John Baldessari

I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art. I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art. I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art. Sometimes, John Baldessari covers the faces in his works simply because he doesn’t want to look at them. Baldessari casually burned 13 years of his own paintings in a cremation ceremony after deciding they simply weren’t working anymore. In discussing beauty, Baldessari admits that the only artwork that ever made him cry was Piet Mondrian's Broadway Boogie Woogie. Over the course of our conversation, Baldessari told us of how he taught juvenile offenders and pushed back against being labeled a “pop artist”, but what we really got from him was a portrait of an artist deeply interested in perception. Not simply what people see, but how they assign meaning, importance, and hierarchy to the world around them. 

TRANSCRIPT:

Tania Ketenjian:
Hello, hello. Welcome to Sight Unseen. My name is Tania Ketenjian, and I'm your host. Sight Unseen is a half-hour weekly program presenting candid conversations with the artists of our time. Thank you to all those that tuned in for my interview with Lynn Shelton, director of Humpday. The film is doing so well, and I recommend people go out and see it. It will test your boundaries around sexual identity and your comfort zones. This week, an interview with another artist that tests boundaries, and that's John Baldessari, who has been coined an LA artist, a pop artist, a conceptual artist, but for all intents and purposes is, well, simply and completely an artist. On the show today, we'll be walking through parts of his exhibition, John Baldessari: A Print Retrospective, at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. And then later, I will be in conversation with him about his work. Baldessari is surely one of the most important artists working today and has won numerous awards. His work is sold for millions of dollars, and he gives most of it away to charity. This year, he received the coveted 2009 Golden Lion Lifetime Achievement Award at the Venice Biennale. I first came across the work of John Baldessari when studying video art. His seminal work, "I Am Making Art," was a video of him standing in a room, moving his arm in different directions, and with each movement proclaiming that he was making art. First seeing that as a teenager, I was blown away at what art could be. If we gave it the name art, a simple hand gesture could be just that. But Baldessari was not always a video artist. When he became an artist, video was not an available medium, and Baldessari was making paintings. Paintings that just weren't selling.

In 1968, he had an epiphany. He would hold a cremation ceremony for his body of paintings. 13 years of work would be burnt to the ground. He placed a notarized affidavit of the death of the paintings in the local paper and began working with words and images, things he culled from the culture around him. Some pieces include, quote, "Tips for Artists Who Want to Sell," Or the answer to, quote, "What is painting?" According to Baldessari, the answer is, "Do you sense how all the parts of a good picture are involved with each other, not just placed side by side? Art is a creation for the eye and can only be hinted at with words." He made videos, took pictures, and made lots and lots of prints. This week at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, we see a large collection of prints as we move through several decades of Baldessari's work, from the '70s until now. He continues to be a sponge for cultural information, playing around with our notions of hierarchy, importance, what we look at, and what we see. A collection of journalists and fans walked through the exhibition with Baldessari, and we will hear some of his comments about his work alongside those of Connie Butler, a curator who has known Baldessari for most of his working life, and later my conversation with him. Here, Connie is describing his very first print. Keep in mind that we're in a large gallery space, so the sound quality is not amazing, but the insights sure are. Stay tuned.


Connie Butler:
The first print that John ever did is this one, "I Will Not Make Any Boring Art," and it started first as a video. With his writing, "I will not make any boring art over and over," like a naughty child being told by his teacher to write a phrase on the wall. Of course, it's a kind of ironic disjunction in that what he's doing is kind of boring, you know?


John Baldessari:
It's beyond boring.


Connie Butler:
It's mind numbing. It's very amusing also in that sense. As I remember, early video art, when the artists were started using video in the late '60s, they were doing it as an experimental medium and it was unedited and it usually was very long. It would be the length of the tape, which was 60 minutes, and a lot of these tapes were thought of as being really boring. John, you can take it from there.


John Baldessari:
The work got its genesis in, I was at California Institute of the Arts at the time, and we had a sister school in Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, which shared a lot of the same philosophy and exchange of professors. They'd asked me to do a show there, and of course no money. So I had written in one of my notebooks, "I will not make any more boring art," just sort of a reminder to myself that would be one of my goals. So then I had the thought that maybe some students there might have similar ideas or were violating that principle. I said, "Well, anybody, any student who wants to come to the gallery and punish themselves for making boring art, reminding themselves that they shouldn't, just write it as many times as they like." I thought pretty much the gallery would be empty, but I have photographs where the gallery's completely covered artists responding. This print was not my idea, it was an idea of Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and, you know, I think that was maybe the first print I ever did. And I owe a lot to doing that print and seeing it because immediately after that I started printing and not writing.


Tania Ketenjian:
Here, Connie is speaking about Baldessari's juxtaposition of images.


Connie Butler:
The fact is that people like to create stories, and if you put anything together, any two or three images together, you can make a story or make a narrative out of it. I think it's just a normal thing that people do, but people will make their own stories, and that's fine. I think sometimes people get frustrated with John's work because they think they have to figure it out. It's like a code that they have to decode, and I don't think it's that. I mean, I think it can exist on many levels, and you can make your own relationships. What's fun about it is you can look at these pieces over and over and see new things and make new relationships.


John Baldessari:
Sometimes I think of myself as a writer, but instead of words I'm using images. I have said before that a word and an image I find equal in weight. A lot of my work, instead of an image I'm using a word, or instead of a word I'm using an image. And then I'm putting them together pretty much like a writer, and you try— a writer, if they're good, they have to have the right word following the right word following the right word. Otherwise, if they're not the right words, then it's too flabby. If they're— or on the other hand, they're two of twos. I mean, it doesn't work. You have to get it just right. For instance, with imagery, if I have— chair, I mean, if I put a table with— yeah, okay, that's a pretty known connection. If I put a chair with a half-eaten apple in it, yeah, I mean, some kid could have been sitting there, you know, and so on. You know, if I put a dead fish there, maybe harder, you know, on and on. So you have to get the— not flabby, not It's not so stretched that it's— you snap, but it's taut, let's say. Yeah, I think that's the word to use.


Tania Ketenjian:
Baldessari is now speaking about his images culled from newspapers, with the heads of people blotted out with circles of primary colors.


John Baldessari:
A lot of the imagery I collect would be throwaway stuff from newspapers, and usually stuff not from the front page, but from local news. And it would be, you know, like the mayor shaking hands with the fire chief, you know, that kind of stuff. Not very interesting except for those people, I guess. But I always was intrigued by them, I didn't know why. And it hit me one day that working in isolation of your studio, you're not doing much about the condition of the world, but those people are. I got to be somewhat, not resentful, but I'm just saying there's something out of whack here. I was working with some other works where I was using these little price stickers for elements. I just, in a fit of, I don't know, exasperation, put them over the faces just so I wouldn't have to look at them. I just felt this immense sense of relief that I somehow leveled the playing field, at least in my mind. Then also I realized that I was working on something that's always interested me, that how we view the world, how we see things, and how we prioritize our vision.

I mean, if you're running into a train station and you're late for the train, you're going to prioritize the clock, wherever it is. But if you're just wandering about, you're not going to look at the clock so much. You might be looking at something else. And when we're looking at people, we pretty much look at their faces. And if you take the face away, you can't see that, then you begin maybe to look at how they're dressed, how they're standing, the ambience in which they're situated. Anyway, you begin to tip the— priorities. And I remember when I used to teach life drawing, beginning students, they would, in a 3-hour class, they might spend 2 hours on the model's head and then the last hour on the rest of the body. And I said, listening to the body is not a collection of parts, it's an organic whole. So I put a drape over the model's head so they couldn't draw the head and they have to start somewhere else. And then at the last hour I take the drape shape off and then it could then deal with the head. I think that's why, that's how it started. Now, I think here in this room, I just, if I think the person's face is interesting to see, I leave it. If I don't think it's interesting, I blot it out. Like the boulders over there, I said I really don't care about how the boulders, how they look, I'm really concerned about the ball and the arms and the spectators. In other words, I'm sort of master of my universe. I can control what people see and pay attention to. Power.


Tania Ketenjian:
And now our conversation where Baldessari shares a moment where he realized that art actually does make a difference.


John Baldessari:
Ever since I got out of school, to support myself, I taught and not because I love teaching, but it was the most interesting thing to do to make money. And public schools for a long time. And I was asked to teach for the California Youth Authority, which is kind of a prison without walls, first-time offenders and kids, usually, crimes where they normally would go to prison for, but first chance, I guess. And so they had to have a teaching program, and I was asked if I would teach. You live up out in the mountains outside of San Diego, and I had a general teaching credential, which I could— meant I could teach other subjects other than art. And it was really horrendous because these kids not used to any kind of supervision, discipline, and attention span of maybe 5 minutes. And a stroke of luck, one of the kids came up to me one time and said, would I open up the arts and crafts room at night where they could work? Because I was also teaching art. And the light bulb epiphany moment was, you know, I'll make a deal. If you and your crew will kind of try to pay attention in class, you know, I'll do it. And it worked. And I saw that they had more of a need for art than I did. And that really got me thinking. I said, here we have no shared values, but they see a reason to do art and I don't. So there must be some need for it. And that's just what I needed, I guess.


Tania Ketenjian:
So there was— there really wasn't much that resonated for you with these kids. Like, you didn't see yourself in them as a kid. You weren't a rough and tumble kid yourself. No, you're a really good kid.


John Baldessari:
Dorky.


Tania Ketenjian:
So, you know, I think thinking about making art, and I think the idea always of art is about beauty, and I'm sure you've been asked about beauty quite a bit, but I can't help myself. And when someone asks you to just describe beauty, you know, just some basic description of it, what is that?


John Baldessari:
I think of all the books written about beauty. And what do I have to say about beauty? Probably one way of thinking about it would be that a work that I remember, there must be some reason for that. Okay, so that might be a good reason. I remember the first and only time I've ever cried in front of a painting and there was, well, a tear, cried sounds too dramatic, and was Mondrian's Broadway Boogie Woogie. I was so overtaken by how beautiful it was. It's like the Supreme Court Justice's comment about pornography, "I know it when I see it." Beauty is too. I guess I know it when I see it.


Tania Ketenjian:
I think that's what— it's an experience. I mean, it's an experience. Something about that Mondrian piece, what I love about it is that utter sense of movement in it. I mean, it's a still image, but there's so much movement.


John Baldessari:
Well, I think also, poor Mondrian, he gets so classified as this severe geometric artist because very few people get to actually see Piet Mondrian paintings, and you realize how painterly they are, and it's not floor tile. I mean, they're beautiful paintings.


Tania Ketenjian:
I think his— the retrospective of his work was one of— a retrospective that really affected me because his paintings were so, as you say, so painterly, and to see him deduce like that, I I can see why that would attract you, because you were talking about reduction rather than addition.


John Baldessari:
Or ablation, yeah. And that's true about how much can be left out of a work before you don't have it anymore. What's that tipping point where it's alive, it's not alive?


Tania Ketenjian:
A lot of people not brand you, for lack of a better term, but definitely associate the term conceptual artist. And what do you think of that term?


John Baldessari:
Well, you have to think of, you know, as you, yes, I don't know what you think, call yourself a journalist, I don't know. Of course, you would understand this. And I, you know, was going to be an art historian for a while, that things, we get terms like Impressionism, Expressionism, and so on as convenient baskets, you know, to group certain artists together. And it usually happens when at the beginning of something and then those artists go off in their their own separate directions. I mean, if I were asked what an impressionist, who an impressionist would be, I would say Monet and then I would get lost. I could say, yeah, I know the usual names, but I don't think they fit. There's no one good definition. And good friends of mine were Roy Lichtenstein and Claes Oldenburg. And I can remember two different occasions with both of them, I just let slip saying pop artist. And they both said, no, we're artists. And I feel the same way about— I emerged at a time when minimal and conceptual art was afoot. And I got that label. And believe me, a lot of dyed-in-the-wool, I call it conceptualist, would prefer that. Label were not applied to me, and I tried to call myself an artist. I just had to write something, a blurb about Ed Ruscha, a good friend of mine, for the British Vogue, and I said, I think the highest accolade given to Ed is now when in press, it's just Ed Ruscha artist, not Ed Ruscha pop artist, not Ed Ruscha California pop artist, Ed Ruscha California artist. It's just Ed Ruscha artist.


Tania Ketenjian:
There was a retro— not a retrospective, but a collection of— it was called A Brief History of Conceptual Art that was here at a gallery, and the curator was Matthew Higgs, who— and I really like him. I think he's a really smart guy. And, um, he was saying, you know, all art is conceptual. You know, it's just kind of seems like such a silly term.


John Baldessari:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.


Tania Ketenjian:
So, uh, someone in there really wanted me to ask you this question. A journalist, another journalist really wanted me to ask you this question, and I assumed an answer about it, but I'm going to see if I'm right. She was saying that the circles on the faces, when you look at me or look at other people around you, is that how you see them? It's unavoidable.


John Baldessari:
I think culturally we're just attuned to that. I guess for a baby it's a mother's breast, I suppose. Yeah. I guess they make the leap somehow after that. I hope they do.


Tania Ketenjian:
Some don't.


John Baldessari:
Yeah, well, we'll stop there. And yeah, it's hard to avoid. I mean, I could look at your ear, but that would drive you crazy, you know. And I remember years back when I was an undergraduate, you know, sitting outside of one of the college buildings and, you know, ogling all the beautiful women going by. And this one guy said, talking about one particular girl, he said, "She's got great ankles." And he was serious. And I thought it was such an unusual statement to come out of a guy's mouth, you know. And that's always been there in my mind, you know, that why, you know, how would we prioritize our vision? And it's according to whatever situation, you know, I mentioned like the clock in the railway station. Yeah, yeah.


Tania Ketenjian:
Actually, it was my sister-in-law has really beautiful ankles and I was commenting on it. And it's just, it's, you know, it changes the whole shape of everything else. I mean, when you look at her ankle, her leg becomes so beautiful.


John Baldessari:
I think we go quite often to do that with hands, you know, for some reason. Well, yeah, and I hope— that's what I love about noses and ears. Yeah, I mean, yeah, yeah, we do have surgical correction of noses, don't we? We do think about that. Ears, only if they, you know, flap out. But I— something I didn't mention in there is that lips somehow and eyes kind of visually detach okay. Noses and ears, they don't detach so well. They're kind of glued there. I like that too.


Tania Ketenjian:
It's true. I mean, the glasses piece has kind of made me think of speaking with someone when they're wearing sunglasses, and I don't feel like I can access them. This other journalist was saying that she felt there was an impersonalness to that particular room. But I find it sort of the opposite of that because you're so much directing what we're looking at, so it becomes very personal.


John Baldessari:
I couldn't resist the glasses because I don't think kids like to wear glasses. They just think they— it makes them kind of feel nerdy, doesn't it, right? Like braces. Yeah. And then I thought, that, and then also the nose. Yeah, as a device to hold glasses up. That's what a nose is for.


Tania Ketenjian:
Pretty much. How does it feel to have someone— I mean, I know you've probably known Connie for quite some time, but it's really interesting to have someone standing next to you explaining all these things about work that you're creating. What's that experience? I'd be curious what that's like.


John Baldessari:
It's really good that they don't come at you cold. Yeah, so it's great because she has a whole vast store of information about me. And she can certainly spot me if I'm coming out with some bullshit, because she knows me.


Tania Ketenjian:
But she seemed to really be able to to get it, you know, she just seemed to really get it.


John Baldessari:
Yeah, and I think we just like the shows she's done, I mean, probably that's one of the reasons that we're good friends is that we have similar tastes. I thought the early Bruce Nauman show was just a marvelous show. She's doing a show now with an old friend of mine, Al Ruppersberg, in LA. Yeah, she's terrific.


Tania Ketenjian:
I saw an interesting Bruce Nauman at MoMA PS1. He was recording the action of mice in his studio.


John Baldessari:
Was it PS1? I saw it in Chelsea. But anyway, it doesn't really matter. Yeah, no, I saw it. Isn't it beautiful? Bruce is amazing. One thing I always said about him, that his ideas are so— they're so stupid, but he can make them work. But it can only be Bruce Nauman. If somebody else tried it, it would be just stupid. But Bruce brings some magic to it. It just— I find it— there was one piece I had never seen before in the show that Connie had where he's trying to make— I don't know if I have the order right— a legal-size envelope out of a standard-size envelope by just cutting and pasting. What a stupid idea, you know? But it's fascinating.


Tania Ketenjian:
Well, I'm sure that resonates with you because you don't— I mean, from what you said in there, you don't really like that having to ascribe to a certain standard of paper, you can— that it should be malleable, that it should be—


John Baldessari:
Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, yeah.


Tania Ketenjian:
The other kind of thing I wanted to explore was, so the "I am not going to make boring art" came from a moving image to a still image, but video now— I mean, gosh, there were several people carrying video cameras in there.


John Baldessari:
It's interesting. We could also just— well, now you have to do still or video and high quality, and so anybody can do it. And so if anybody can do it, why would you want to do it? You know, that sort of thing. It's just like in the '70s when the Sony Portapak came out, it was really fascinating for artists because it was something new to use. I haven't done any video for a long time, and a lot of artists of that generation, you know, haven't. Would I do video again? I don't know. It would depend. I mean, as a medium, it doesn't fascinate me anymore like when it did earlier. Earlier, for me, it was like movie Polaroid film. You could instantly see it. You wouldn't have to send it to the process— the process— see rushes or whatever, you know, you just know exactly what you got.


Tania Ketenjian:
What I like about video, or at least the way it was used, or the way I think it was used in the early '70s, is it was a real way for artists to get a sense of what they're doing, you know, who they are, to really be able to not be critical of it, but not be critical in a negative way, but to be critical of it in an observation way.


John Baldessari:
Well, yeah, I think because then editing was not available, color wasn't available. You would, as I said, had to edit in camera. So it's pretty much something to do with the art, that artist, because there were no assistants. You might bring in a friend or whatever, that sort of thing. And I think one of the reasons where I stopped doing video, I was on an NEA panel for video artists and everything looked like MTV. And I said, well, if that's what people are aspiring to, that I think, you know, that's not what interests me. And video has a real problem in that you can walk out on a painting. It's really uncomfortable to walk out on a video. And that's why I think, you know, a genius piece, let's say, would be something like Andy Warhol's Empire where it doesn't really matter. You don't have to see it again. And you can just get a sense of it. It's fine. And then, as you know, a lot of the biennials and nothing but blank rooms full of artists' videos in there. I just don't have the endurance for that sort of thing. But it works really well for museums and curators because they'll say, yeah, you know, show a video and that's it. We'll paint the room black and that's it. You don't have to do any more.


Tania Ketenjian:
John Baldessari speaking about beauty, his work, and the way we see. I spoke with him when he was here to present his exhibition, John Baldessari: A Print Retrospective, at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. In August, I'll be traveling down to LA to meet him in his studio, and we'll have more of his insights on this very program. But for now, to see some images of his work, please visit radiotania.org and go to the blog section. My name is Tania Ketenjian. This is Sight Unseen, a half-hour weekly program featuring candid conversations with the artists of our time. You're listening to Resonance 104.4 FM, the UK's first radio art station.